According to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, our language influences how we think and experience the world. That’s easy to imagine. Certainly our symbolism of mathematics influences how we calculate. Can you imagine doing moderately complex math with Roman numerals or without zero or negative numbers? But recently I was reminded that technological media also influences our perception of reality, and I have a Hackaday post to thank for it.
The post in question was about color TV. When I was a kid, most people had black and white TVs, although there were color sets. Even if you had a color set, many shows and movies were in black and white. Back then, many people still shot black and white film in their cameras, too, for many reasons. To make matters worse, I grew up in a small town, reading books from the local library that were ten or twenty years behind the times.
At some point, I read a statistic that said that most people dream in black and white. You may find this surprising, as I’ll bet you dream in color. It turns out, how people dream may have changed over the years and still and motion photography may be the reason.
The Post
In the post, I posed a question I’ve thought about many times: Did people dream in black and white before the advent of photography? It was kind of an off-hand remark to open the post, but many people reacted to it in the comments. They seemed surprised that I would ask that because, of course, everyone dreams in color.
I asked a few people I knew who also seemed very surprised that I would assume anyone ever dreams in color. But I was sure I had been told that sometime in the past. Time to hit the Internet and find out if that was incorrect or a false memory or something else. Turns out, it was indeed something else.
The Science
A scientific paper from 2008 held the answer. It turns out that science started asking questions like this in the early 1900s. Up through the 1940s, people overwhelmingly reported dreaming in black and white, at least most of the time. Color dreams were in the minority, although not unheard of.
Then something changed. Studies that occurred in the 1960s and later, show exactly the opposite. People almost always dream in color and rarely in black and white. Of course, that correlates well with the rise of color photos, movies, and television. What’s more is, while there is no scientific evidence gathering about earlier times, there is a suspicious lack of, for example, a Shakespeare quote about “The gray world of slumber…” or anything else that would hint that the writer was dreaming in black and white.
Interpretation
Judging from the paper, it seems clear that most people agree that color media played a role in this surprising finding. What they can’t agree on is why. It does seem unlikely that your dreams really change based on your media consumption. But it is possible that your recollection changes. This is particularly true since the way researchers acquired data changed over that time period, too. But even if the data doesn’t show that you dreamed in black and white, it did show that you remembered dreaming in black and white.
For that matter, it isn’t clear that anyone understands how you experience dreams visually, anyway. It isn’t like the back of your eyelids are little movie screens. You don’t actually see anything in a dream, you only remember seeing it.
The Question
If something as simple as black-and-white movies and TV can change how we perceive dreams, you have to wonder how much tech is changing our reality experience in other ways. Do we live differently because we have cell phones? Or the Internet? Will virtual reality alter our dream lives? It would be interesting to fast-forward a century and see what historians say about our time and how strangely we perceive reality today.
I suspect there are a lot of people wondering “You dream in pictures?”
The blind.
Not necessarily, ability to (mentally) visualize is not a universal ability – see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
I struggle to visualise colour – detail, yes, but not colour.
Although there doesn’t seems to be a direct connection between aphantasia and dreams.
Or at least there are enough people that identify as aphantasic, but still “see” dreams.
I’ve heard of that study before, or at least had that trivia in my brain, that people started dreaming in color around the introduction of color TV. Though I’ve always been surprised that there is no follow-up data on tribes/cultures that never experienced modern media as a control.
Personally I’ve always assumed the relationship went both ways. That people dreamed in color before black and white film/photo then were influenced by that media to dream in black and white then returned to color.
It makes sense: before the introduction of color TV, there weren’t TV emissions with the color burst signal in the porch, so the sleeping brain couldn’t decode the phase information in the dream 🤪
“It would be interesting to fast-forward a century and see what historians say about our time and how strangely we perceive reality today.”
Or with the increasingly massive amount of disinformation we’re continually exposed to, maybe reality will eventually become a subjective concept.
The disinformation has always been there, it has simply shifted from centralized to decentralized. I can’t believe people are so credulous about the “disinfo crisis” as if propaganda was somehow stopped for a few decades after the cold war and completely went away. Or never existed before social media.
If you think this just started, then you simply swallowed the preceding propaganda whole. It happens to most people after all. Most people are lying when they say that they didn’t buy it when Colin Powell held up the vial of baking soda and said Iraq had bioweapons and other WMD. Most people trusted the experts. Most people (including on the left) initially supported that totally unrelated and unjustified war, then retconned it afterwards. Info sources were just a bit more consolidated back then. And now those same people who pretend they never supported it are welcoming back the Cheneys with open arms. Ludicrous! Embarrassing!
Keyword is “increasing”. OP never mentioned that there was no disinformation in the past.
Your entire post is a response to things no one said here.
I think you may have been commenting on a different article. This article was about idiosyncrasies in historical reporting about whether people dream in color or black and white.
He was commenting on a post about disinformation. Nice gaslighting though.
I think you can point to a greater number of explicit propaganda outlets today, but yes, the only real difference is that it is now much easier to notice.
Everyone should read Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s /Manufacturing Consent/, which forensically examines how our entire information environment is propaganda and always has been. As they point out, no one gets a job in media if they don’t already have the “correct” instincts, which among other things means knowing what questions not to push.
CNN occasionally mentioned the idea that Iraqi WMDs may have been a lie, but then they went on to the next story which assumed it was true – people weren’t deceived, they were just continually distracted. And that’s still how major news outlets work. The problem is you now have youtube channels and podcasts which will stick with those awkward questions for week after week, and that is like throwing shoes into the gears of the consent-manufacturing machine. It’s the same /facts/ we always had – actual reporters all still work for the mainstream media – but without the control of our /attention/ it feels very different.
During the previous “generation”, news outlets started claiming that their news are unbiased and truthful, more so than their competitors. It’s simply that this pretense is now dropped and public media is again openly partisan instead of hiding behind fake neutrality.
Future researchers will probably blame short attention span media for the weird jumble that dreams have always been. And illiteracy and excess emoji consumption on the lack of ability to read in dreams.
Many times, I’ve been almost able to read but the letters are not quite in focus. Looking closely and concentrating always wakes me up just as the letters come into focus. So frustrating!
“Do we live differently because we have cell phones?” Yes, in so many obvious ways.
“Or the Internet?” Yes, in so many obvious ways.
“Will virtual reality alter our dream lives?” It already has, if you count dreaming that you are a character in a video game as “altering our dream lives.”
I don’t buy it. Do you only dream about TV shows? Do you only dream at the level of fidelity that is currently possible with photography and video? Did you dreams have VHS tape artifacts in the 1990s? Did people in Botswana with no TV or access to photographs in the early 1900s also dream in black and white, or color? Seems like some question priming is happening.
Especially in the early 20th century, people would not be spending much of their total time looking at black and white photographs or watching black and white movies. 99% of their waking life would be in full color, unless you think that cone cells evolved along with television. Why would they dream in black and white?
This sounds like a pet theory from some social “”scientist”” which he then went out and found some people to interview in a leading way to support it. One so-called study from 2008 which is merely a rehash of century-old interviews of uncertain providence isn’t convincing. My grandparents certainly never dreamed in grayscale.
Did people dream in color before the advent of photography, and then a suddenly a small portion of black and white media existing suddenly switched the way everyone dreamed? Or did they dream in lithograph? Did their dream-style track the popular styles in painting? It’s absurd, they mostly dreamed the way their eyes took in the most emotionally important moments of their lives and interactions with others, which was always in living color. They weren’t as plugged in to constant hours of media like we are today, either, so I’d expect that they wouldn’t often be having the kind of tetris-effect dreams we sometimes have.
“tetris-effect dreams”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
Why wouldn’t they? My dreams have very muted colors most of the time, as if there’s a grey veil over everything. There is “color” if you think about it, but it’s more like a distant vague idea of color, like seeing in moonlight instead of daylight and remembering what color different objects are.
I get more colorful dreams when having a nap during the daytime, which I suppose comes from seeing light through the eyelids.
Strange. Are you able to visualize things mentally in color?
I cannot easily imagine color as color, but each color has a specific “feeling” to it that also includes things like how shiny it is, or what the texture of the surface is, or what objects are commonly associated with it. With that context, I can bring up more vivid thoughts of the color itself, but without context I can’t just conjure up “red” or “yellow”; if anything appears at all it’s going to be very muted and grey.
It’s like, a color is not one thing but many things – a composite of qualities. It’s hard to imagine “just color”.
U can only dream things that have experienced, TV, Internet, pictures, basically your own life as a movie, playing in strange scenerios… You can’t dream something you haven’t conceived, perceived and experienced… It’s like someone dreaming about car in 1700s when they cudnt postulate or categorise as they had no experiences to make sense of it.. So I do believe it was possible to dream in black white maybe even with subtitles too, only to midnight tho, then it was teletext only or weird girl in circle with blackboard and freaky ass clown
Then how did anyone invent a car?
It would seem a pretty easy question to solve, there are primitive tribes who have been contacted all over the world, many of their members have never been exposed to media in any form, so why not just ask them if they dream in colour?
Colors yes for sure. And quite often colors that do not exist. But also smell, touch is sometimes involved. Sometimes it´s even pure abstract pattern. And quite often: when i have to tackle anything complicated or challenging, I find a developed answer during my dream. To the point I have to wake up and write it down or record my voice, to be sure to recollect it when I need. Most of the times it´s not needed. But people I know, in my dreams ? seldom.
And what about us, who don’t dream in pictures at all?
I wonder really about blind people what their dreams can be. Tell us more about what your are ?
The post is right, in knowledge of a language can alter perception of the world, such as the Aboriginal “Guugu Yimithirr” language that offers North/South/East/West relative directionality as a core component, can change how people will perceive themselves in relation to the world.
Or consider people who don’t even ‘speak’ language – deaf people will think in sign language, visuals, for inner monologue alternatives, and someone blind/visually impaired doesn’t visualize, picture something in their mind the same way as someone else. (there are so many different ways of conceiving, inner monologue isn’t even the ‘default’, only 30-50% of people use that as the regular mode of thought.
Technology has always altered ourselves, and our ability to set and reach goals, interact with and perceive reality – in the same way it also changes how we think, and the pathways we can use to get to information and express it as well. (we don’t first think/dream of sending telegrams vs texts to people in modern times too, I’d hazard)
With technologies nowadays, you can even alter how you perceive the world directly, via sensory substitution/addition/expansion, as I’ve taken to doing as a hobby the past couple years with various “sensory weavers”. Maybe not dreams yet, but certainly memories, predictions including the new sensory experiences are there, and new ways of thinking about things because of the new senses brought to the forefront of experience through technology.
How we conceive, think even in general is largely tied in with how we perceive – and if we can alter that to weave in new information threads beyond our biological perception, the future of what is possible for our perception of reality is beyond even our current perspective to predict fully.
The future of “perception” is going to be wild and wonderful, full of diversity just like reality itself. At least until people try to regulate how people can perceive, think by extension via the technologies…. :(
“The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden”
Without freedom of perception, then perhaps there can be no freedom of thought, and as Benjamin Franklin said, “Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom”.
“With the first link, the chain is forged.”
I wonder, which is the cause and which is the effect? When you live in a culture that uses absolute directions, the language of course reflects those practices. The practical everyday realities of the culture is what shapes the perception of the world, and the language follows.
If you need to remember where north is to get around the place you live in, you attach that knowledge to your language quite naturally – like saying “the flower pot is north of the bicycle” – because you’re already thinking in those terms. But the linguists then look at it backwards and claim your use of language is what makes you think in absolute directions – not the fact that you need the information for navigation.
A chicken and egg situation – which caused which, do we think about location because the language demands it, or does language evolve, develop location information in that way because the thoughts, culture demand it?
It may be they are interdependent, both shaping our perception, and each other in different ways. As another comment pointed out, language is more a tool than anything:
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/18/do-you-dream-in-color/#comment-8063623
but, if that is the case, then perhaps it is a tool specifically designed for usage of such directionality, in a way that is grammatically less useful or coherent in terms of speaking to others. As you pointed out, we can use such language in context in English (or other languages), but they aren’t as meant for usage of it in that way.
Like how you can translate lyrics, writing, poetry and more from one language to another, but is may not come over as cleanly, or with the same intent, articulation as a language it was design in, meant for conceptually could do.
It is a good question, and one I’m not sure we have a solid answer for yet.
Better question is, when you stop requiring absolute directions to navigate, will the language change or will the people stick with thinking in absolute directions, or will they just keep the words but change the thinking?
Does “west” become equal to “left” and “east” become equal to right?
While I was in the First Grade, we were taught “right” and “left” looking at a projection on the West wall of the classroom. For a while after that, I had to face West when I was trying to recall which direction was “left or “right”!
(Later on I seemed to have lost that ability! B^)
In the Estonian and Finnish languages, “bottom” and “north” share the same word, because their iron age world view saw the map upside down. The north was the bottom of the world. Nowadays north is up top, but it’s still called bottom.
I find that I dream with enough fidelity to understand what it is I’m dreaming about. Sometimes that doesn’t require very much (for familiar things), while other times it requires a lot, and certainly can involve color.
Or at least, that’s how I tend to remember my dreams.
Gee, I’ve been too busy to notice. My bad = (
How can you dream only in monochrome when you have trichromatic vision?
How did people dream before photography?
Based on what you see and experience when you’re conscious…
Dreams are a lot like ai generated videos of you think about it
They don’t make a lot of sense when you think about it, because parts of your brain are communicating with parts that it doesn’t communicate while you’re awake
That’s why you can break laws of physics in dreams but not in reality
Ever fly around like Superman in a dream, felt real didn’t it? But you can’t actually fly In reality unless you own a pilots license and flying machine
Can’t read in your dreams, text will just look like a mess of unrecognizable letters and gibberish words
If you try you’ll wake up
Because you cause your conscious brain to activate in order to read it.
Same with other things that people lucid dreams about
If you think you’re dreaming but can read text and do conscious actions
Something may be out of place
Can attest to that, I have tried. Either it’s jumbled mess or I wake up. Most of the time that I “read” in dream is of me telling myself what I think I am reading. Same thing with writing, I can never remember what I actually wrote and only have sense of watching a “movie” as I wrote out stuff.
I often experience seeing weird glyphs and symbols that resemble text when I look at a blank wall immediately after I wake up from a heavy dream cycle. It usually only lasts ten to fifteen seconds.
I’ve read in my dreams but nothing extensive. Mostly just signs.
They probably dreamt with a few painting stills. Almost no action but likely crazy art like MC Escher and Picasso.
Science never did any research in how people dreamt back then and the oldest human living are from early 20th century when black and white dreams were still common so there’s no way to find out for sure how people dreamt pre-motion picture and still photo era.
Tribes.
In low light levels people only have monochromatic vision.
I still see color even with moonlight, minus my servere astigmatism which makes everything look like a camera that can’t focus near or far
I even see full color in my peripheral
My field of view is almost 180 degrees, I can look straight and still see you on the left or right side
Some people have more cone density than others
Some people are also colorblind….more bichromatic
Even dogs see color, not black and white like people who don’t know what they talk about say. They see bichromatic not trichromatic
The one time I remember having a black and white dream, I dreamed I was in a Lassie rerun episode. So in that case, the black and white dream was clearly a product of media influence.
It’s funny that when I think back to things I’ve watched in b/w, I think of them being in colour. I’m sure this is the case for many people.
My brain tries to fill in the colours in an sort of abstract way based on how I perceive things in the real world.
So those studies are saying despite of human being walking on heart about six million years and watching the colors every single day we used to dream in black and white? and then the color TV appears and magically we started to dream in color? come on guys, I was reading sometime ago that the pressure over the scientifics to publish studies and white papers is leading to sh*tty studies. So who knows.
In the other hand, I was so impressed about how AI videos of monsters and celebrities (do you remember Will Smith eating spaguetti) align with those descriptions of chamanic travels described in The Teachings of Don Juan back in 1968, so if you wanted to identify a lucid dreaming you had to do reality checks like looking at your hands, they usually appears deformed or with more fingers, written text appears deformed too or they change every time you see them, and in general, the visions seamless change without noticing. So I guess our loved brain process and the AI process data in a slighty similar way. So maybe you guys should try some lucid dreaming, it is fun.
btw I know all the polemic about the autor of the book, but the techniques definitelly work.
Color exists in a dream only so my CV as it matters to the dream.
It isn’t so much if what’s there, as to what you remember.
Only so much as it matters.
And autocorrect seems to have gone haywire for me today.
“… what you remember”
Something very interesting sometimes occurs when an external event happens that gets inserted into your dream. Say for example, someone pokes you with a finger to wake you up. It is (to you, asleep, a totally unpredictable event – you can’t see that someone is about to poke/wake you.
Sometimes though, in your dream, there is a sequence that leads up to being woken up by being poked with a finger.
Your brain can take an unpredictable event and construct a story to fit it in – in hindsight – to “your reality”. Just like The Matrix – your mind makes it real!
Perhaps this could be explored further by interviewing people in 3rd world countries, isolated from television and movie. Although, that populace is rapidly diminishing I suppose.
There’s some somewhere in South America that has never seen any form of technologies other than a helicopter flying over. They probably describe the heli as a very large and loud dragonfly.
I doubt scientists could ever talk with them to ask how they dream, the language barrier will be a major hurdle. Then having them explain the vision they see while they sleep is likely another challenging concept for the natives to talk about.
When my mom, as a child growing up on a farm, saw her first airplane, an adult asked her what it was;
she replied “birdie tractor”!
B^)
Yuk. You did not see much of this world, obviously.
I can’t cite anything to prove it, but I seem to remember that the question came up before, and I came away thinking that the better explanation is this: In most dreams, nothing is either one way or the other until you pay attention to it. A clock isn’t right or wrong until you look at it, a light bulb isn’t on or off until you check, etc. So, most of the time objects don’t have a color until it matters, at which point you’ll remember them in whatever way is plausible to you in the dream.
I believe I once had a dream where nothing was a specific color except the lightsabers, because in star wars the color of lightsaber matters. But it wasn’t that everything else had a color and that color was gray – instead it was just that the color didn’t matter. The only time gray might happen in a dream for me was when having a dream in some way related to something that was gray; e.g. dreaming about if two different black-and-white TV characters met.
So in short, I think most times dreams are neither color nor black and white.
It may have been easier to do some types of complex math with different number systems.
For an off the top of my head example: in binary doubling an integer is as easy as adding a zero. Halving is likewise as simple. Much easier than decimal. I’m sure the low level guys know a bunch more that I’ve long forgotten.
Right, but in the decimal system multiplying by ten is “as easy as adding a zero.”
Binary systems were commonly used in shipping and warehousing, because the rules of addition and subtraction are so simple that there’s little room for error and you can perform the whole thing without much thought.
Suppose you’re standing there at the warehouse door and someone comes in carrying two bags of grain. You have an abacus or a piece of note paper in hand, so you change the 2’s position mark and carry the result forwards. Someone else comes in with a cart of three bags – so you change the 1’s and carry, then 2’s and carry… It’s completely mechanical stuff that you can learn to do with your eyes closed.
Do you dream in mono or binaural spatial space? I have sights and sounds but only the vagueness of these kind of details although sounds can be distant or close.
Here’s another one for them to look into. Who do people who were born totally blind dream of?
I was born profoundly deaf and even though I wear hearing aids and my dream is almost always silent. Think of watching a TV program on mute. My dream are usually color.
I spoke to a man born blind that described having experienced closed eye visuals for the first time after after bioassaying tryptamine tickling compounds. I didn’t ask him what his experience in a dream state was though.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is likely wrong, according to a June 2024 article in Nature.
Instead, it’s more likely that language is merely a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking
While it’s still there, you might be able to get a not-paywalled link to the article here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40756176
Is this why androids dream of electric sheep?
No, their drams begin after counting the electric ovines.
“It does seem unlikely that your dreams really change based on your media consumption.”
Maybe in the long term but I feel like you’d have to be particularly unaffected or disinterested in media not to have some of it creep into your dreams. I have had times where an intense gaming session led to continuing to play the game in my dreams, for example.
“You don’t actually see anything in a dream, you only remember seeing it.”
I don’t know if this rings true. Enough people experience sleep paralysis and hallucinations due to it to suggest that we do see things while dreaming. Taken to an extreme you could say the same thing about most or all experience, that we can only be aware of sensing something because we remember it.
In this case, I think it makes a lot of sense to believe the brain is capable of self-inducing data into its senses and does so for some reason during sleep.
Cruising freely and shamelessly into speculation here…. but without artificial light, our eyes only see in grayscale 3.
The rural electrification project only started in the 1930s (so it would take time to reach people) 1 and the first color broadcast was in like the 1950s 2. So I could easily see color dreams being atypical because they deviate quite far from the environment. A lot of important stuff probably happened at night and during the “witching hours”, so I could see our brains focusing on events happening then. “Broad daylight” is relatively safe.
So in the evening hours, color was generally gone even though fear wasn’t. If dreams are a way to process the day, then high on the list for processing would be dangerous events. A brain would be focused on those things, and so dreams would mostly be grayscale.
…but since we’re speculating with little empirical data to back anything, I’ll also posit that the simulation we live in was running really old hardware and inefficient algorithms “back in the day”, so dreams were in grayscale to save CPU time. Sleepers don’t need a fully simulated world, and the stories they tell each other really help the simulation along!
Without artificial light, you go out in the sunlight. Are you trying to say that you don’t see colors outside in the daytime under sunlight? Actually, no. The article you link to is about sight in low-light conditions. When it is very dark, you do only see in shades of gray.
Yes, the cone cells in the eye need more energy to activate than the rod cells.
I see. A lot of us need to visit a therapist. ;)
It sounds like a lot of the readers of HaD are tryptamine deficient. See “The hallucinogenic world of tryptamines: an updated review” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25877327/
How do you explain the art of the 1960s when many painters of psychedelia painted their dreams (hallucinations) in vivid DayGlo colors.
My next Question is does the same thing happen with sound? Do my parents’ dreams sound like AM radio?
I dream in 3d color and in a time dialation which allows me on average 3 to ten years in dream. Enough time to meet a girl, marry have a job, have children. I think the dreams unfold both forward and backwards at the same time.
Dreams can create vivid retroactive memories, it’s rare for me but it sounds like you’re constantly filling in the history of your dreams with new memories perhaps
Sounds a bit like the episode of ST:TNG where Picard’s brain is hijacked by an alien probe. He learns to play the recorder (flute) while “dreaming”.
Man they installed color for y’all? I sorta dream a black and white outline of everything, vaguely 3d
A part of me wants to link the impacts of lead poisoning on the thought-processing centers and visual cortex in the brain, but the rest of me is gonna let all you lead-brains google it for yourselves ;)
When I was a teen (I suppose I could have been a tween), I had a Tandy Color Computer (so now you know roughly how old I am), and I learned BASIC. One day, I got an assembler cartridge, and played with assembly language for the first time. That night, I had brilliant color dreams; the only time I remember having that.
My normal dreams are, well, I don’t remember really noticing color. I’m not even convinced that I normally see scenes, but more the idea of scenes than actual scenes. The semi-nightmares I vaguely remember are falling off a roof (it’s dim/dark and I don’t see the ground well and I wake before I splat) and moving through what might be an attic, but could be running along along a roofline in the dark. Maybe it’s both.
Maybe it’s due to a diet change that affected a lot of people? WWI / WWII / Great Depression era stuff, that would have affected how people handle food, which would have affected their kids? I grew up eating a lot of canned foods. That strikes me as more likely than still / motion images.
I remember trying tryptophan, but that would have been years later, and I don’t remember it affecting my dreams; I should get some and try it.
Ah, looks like I confused tryptophan with tryptamine.
I wonder if dream color and dream clarity relate to aphantasia.
I immediately put a poll up on my cyber security group discord bc I was shocked to find when I asked myself the question…I couldn’t answer it!
After some reflection I settled that most of my dreams I recall as black and white, only when I have increasingly vivid strange dreams are they in color. Fever dreams, usually dreams induced by some outside influence. But even then I really struggled to come to a clear answer.
Great article Al, keep on hacking everyone!